Faulkner's Litmus Test

Faulkner's map og Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi
(From: U. of Michigan Library via Hub Pages)

"I write. It is what I have always done, searching for what Robert Frost called 'a momentary stay against confusion.'

     But I want more than just wisdom — every writer does, outside the most hopeless of naïfs. Like most of my fellow scribes, I also yearn for fame, greatness and immortality, preferably in that order. Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I would also like to write a play and perhaps some poetry, if there is time.
     Let me go further: If you do not want your own version of the above, if you are indeed a reasonable and/or responsible young man or woman, then literature is not for you. If you have a compelling personal story to tell, tell it to a therapist. An MBA will do you far more good than an MFA. Pursue writing only if you are pathologically unable to pursue anything else. Otherwise, consider advertising." — Alexander Nazaryan, Salon
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"[...] Little Screens: Short Stories"

This 1939 edition of Cosmopolitan feature a short story
by Ernest Hemingway (From: Azio Media)

"The short story, like the western, is periodically said to be on the brink of a comeback. The most recent example of this boosterism: an article by the New York Times’ new(ish) publishing reporter, Leslie Kaufman, titled 'Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories, in which 'a proliferation of digital options' is said to offer short fiction 'not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.' […]

     A short story can be anything from an exquisite specimen of the literary art to a diverting pastime. In its mid-20th-century heyday, when even magazines like Mademoiselle published short fiction by writers like William Faulkner, stories offered readers an hour or two of satisfying narrative entertainment at the end of the day. Television has largely replaced that function, and the literary short story itself became a more rarefied thing, a form in which writers exhibit the perfection of their technique, rather like lyric poetry. With the exception of certain communities of genre writer and readers — most notable in science fiction — these writers aren’t reaching a wider audience because they aren’t especially trying to. The question is: Has (or will) the ongoing revolution in communications changed that? Is there any reason why it should? The Internet has seen a flourishing of online literary journals like the Collagist and Narrative, but the suggestion that these sites are turning short fiction into promising new sources of 'revenue' would probably make their editors laugh.
     Bitterly."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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"HarperCollins Publishers announced today [November 26, 2012] the launch of HarperTeen Impulse, a digital imprint focusing on Young Adult short stories and novellas. The new imprint will publish short-form works from new and established authors, providing original and exciting new teen ebooks across a wide variety of genres.
     HarperTeen Impulse will publish between one and four titles a month, all of which will go on sale the first Tuesday of that month, branded 'Impulse Tuesday.' Impulse titles will benefit from dedicated program marketing, including extensive social media outreach, monthly newsletters, cross-promotion in HarperTeen print books, and strategic sales promotions."
— PRWeb
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William Faulkner: "demon-driven"

OXFORD, Miss. — Five decades after his death, William Faulkner still draws literary pilgrims to his Mississippi hometown, the 'little postage stamp of native soil' he made famous through his novels.
     Oxford inspired the fictional town of Jefferson that was a frequent setting for his stories, and it's commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Nobel laureate's death Friday [today] with several events that include a tag-team reading of his novel, The Reivers, beginning about daybreak.
     Roughly 25,000 people a year visit Faulkner's antebellum home, Rowan Oak, which is now owned by the University of Mississippi. The author's meticulous handwriting appears on the walls of his downstairs office. Using pencil, he outlined events of his 1954 novel, A Fable.
     William Griffith, the Rowan Oak curator since 1999, said writing was a 'demon-driven' task for Faulkner.
     'You're going to hear about the agony and the sweat and the difficulty and the compulsion,' Griffith said. 'You're not going to hear anything about how great it was, how relaxing and beautiful it was. None of that. He just did what he had to do to get it done.'"
— Emily Wagster Pettus, Huffington Post
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Recovered and Uncovered

From: RareList Rare Books

"From the famous theft of Ernest Hemingway’s novels to the loss of William Faulkner’s novel four times, manuscripts have had a way of getting lost. It is no less than a eureka moment when they’re found many years later.
     This year has been quite eventful in terms of discovering lost literary treasures. Here’s a look at the famous manuscripts which were found in 2011."
— Hindustan Times
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"An unpublished and previously unknown Enid Blyton novel is believed to have turned up in an archive of the late children's author's work.
Mr Tumpy's Caravan is a 180-page fantasy story about a magical caravan.
It was in a collection of manuscripts that was auctioned by the family of Blyton's eldest daughter in September.
     'I think it's unique,' said Tony Summerfield, head of the Enid Blyton Society. 'I don't know of any full-length unpublished Blyton work.'
     The collection was bought by the Seven Stories children's book centre in Newcastle.
Blyton, who died in 1968, remains a children's favourite and a publishing phenomenon thanks to such characters as the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and Noddy.
An estimated 500 million copies of her books have been sold around the world, with updated and reprinted versions of her most popular stories still selling eight million copies a year."
— Ian Youngs, BBC
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"It's quite surreal," says Hannah Green, archivist at the Seven Stories centre for children's books in Newcastle and one of the few to have read the story in recent years. "It's about a caravan on legs which gets up and walks around," she continues.
     In the caravan with Mr Tumpy are his two friends, Muffin and Puffin, and a dog called Bun-Dorg.
"They live in this caravan and go off on adventures," she explains. "They don't really control it - it decides where it's going to go and when it's going to stay somewhere."
— Hannah Green, in an interview with Ian Youngs (BBC)
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"In 2008, Enid Blyton was voted the UK's best loved writer, beating JK Rowling, Austen and even Shakespeare. Yet, although characters like Noddy and the Famous Five still have devoted fans, Blyton has become a controversial figure, dogged by criticisms of her writing style and accusations of sexism and racism."
— BBC Archive
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The Full Treatment

From: DIY Gadgets

"The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by Deadwood creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn’t have been. The mindless take on Deadwood is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? — get over it, for cryin’ out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch’s dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner’s fiction, as well. (Also, let’s not forget we’re talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob — this isn’t Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing. [...]
     Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after 'Where do you get your ideas?') is 'Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?' Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Lord of the Rings franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
     Far more often, however, the results are disappointing — let the recent adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go stand as a case in point. Much of a novel has to be cut to fit a 90- to 120-minute dramatization, and this can mean more than just the loss of supporting characters or scenes. Most movies conform to a three-act structure (some screenwriters will insist that it’s actually a four-act structure), a form with a proven ability to hold audiences’ interest through a single viewing. Novels, meant to be read over multiple sittings, have more freedom. Trimming a novel like Bleak House to fit the three-act format alters the fundamental shape of the work, often subtracting from the novel the very roominess and complication that made you love it in the first place.
     A television series, however, has the time to spread out and explore the byways and textures of a novel’s imagined world. Furthermore, while theatrical film is a medium in which the director reigns, in television, as Rushdie told the Observer, 'the writer is the primary creative artist. You have control in a way that you never have in the cinema. The Sopranos was David Chase, The West Wing was Aaron Sorkin.' "
— Laura Miller, Salon
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Strokes Of The Pen: Faust, The Devil, And "Cultivating Literary Friendships"

From: The Manhattan Rare Book Company

"It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is led on a firing range. They meet you alertly, brightly drawing from natty holsters their own signs of power, rank and aid, and then requesting that you do the same. They aren’t evil, really, and the impulse behind it is so close to camaraderie it almost smells right. We all need help, and we all want to help each other, which makes the nuances of the transaction murky. Some people never see the problem at all and others treat every request like you’re asking for a toe of which they are particularly fond. In the end, parsing the aspirational nature of literary friendship is as much of a longshot as sexing the yeti. [...]
     But I thought I’d give it a shot, and luckily I had help. Because I’m a collector of art and old books, I get email notifications of auctions, and the day I was to lecture my students, an old autographed letter appeared on the Ira & Larry Goldberg auction site. It illustrated the nature of 'transactional' so beautifully I read it aloud that night.
     It’s a one-page, single-spaced TLS (as they say) [Typed Letter Signed]
from William Faulkner. He is reacting to a request for a blurb in this, 1961, his final full year of life. To summarize the career until then: he’d struggled, his work had gone out of print, he’d almost drunk himself to death in Hollywood, where he was a failure. In 1946, washed up, spit out, he’d had his forgotten work reissued in The Portable Faulkner. This was the lightning and the thunder that changed his life. Seemingly overnight, he made an entire region of America a viable place to pan for talent and story, he won the Nobel Prize, he won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award too, and by January 1961, he’d spent about 15 years taking what comforts he could as a celebrated, revered, and golden writer.

From: AllStarPics

     The addressee is named Joan Williams. She is 30 years old, and she’s written the manuscript for a first novel called The Morning and the Evening. I mention this because Faulkner doesn’t begin it with 'Dear Miss Williams.' [...]"
— Glen David Gold, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Buy all the books mentioned in this article here...

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." — Thomas Mann

Illustration: Michael Hale

"[...] what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
     Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
     There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
     More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, 'it's just typing.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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